Jerry Yang and his wife, Cindy Tian, look at each other across the dining room table. In calm and measured voices, they prepare for Yang's death.

As scientists, they review the data they have recently received from doctors. His cancer, which started in his salivary glands eight years earlier, has returned to his lungs. Doctors tell him there is no point to more surgery, and they are not optimistic about chemotherapy either.

The good news, doctors tell Yang, is that the tumors are slow-growing. The bad news is that they will one day kill him.

A cancer prognosis, however, is more art than science and Yang and Tian depend upon the subjective calculus of the terminally ill to come up with a grim guess. Yang estimates he has two years to live, two years to wrap up the work that has consumed him for a decade.

Yang tells his wife he will devote his final years to his quest to create stem cells through cloning, cells that will be the exact genetic match of those in patients suffering from a variety of devastating diseases.

``I am happiest,'' he says, ``when I am working.''

So in the fall of 2005, the 46-year-old UConn scientist publicly reveals that his cancer has returned and that he wants to create human embryos through cloning so he can harvest their precious stem cells. It may be too late to treat his own illness, but one day cloning could lead to the treatment of the type of cancer that's killing him.

Almost immediately, Yang confronts a host of problems. Some are personal. Yang and Tian worry constantly about their teenage son, Andrew, who had become increasingly rebellious in high school. They talk about the importance of Tian, if she is to lead the family, advancing her own career.

And Tian is anxious about Yang's mental health. His irrepressible grin, sliced in half by surgery that has carved a cavern in the left side of his face, has disappeared almost completely.

Usually affable, Yang is increasingly argumentative and irritable both at home and at work. He closely protects the secret of his changing behavior: Yang has stopped taking the antidepressants he's been on for about a year.

In 2004, surgeons at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center had opened his skull and removed a peach-size piece of his brain that had been destroyed by earlier radiation treatment of his salivary gland tumors. After the operation, Yang looked out the window of the 18th floor of the hospital and felt like jumping.

``I can fly,'' he thinks.

He had never felt suicidal before. The doctors prescribe antidepressants and the feeling quickly goes away, but other neurological symptoms emerge. Soon after the operation, Yang stumbles over names he should know.

Visiting his brother in East Lansing, Mich., Yang finds that his mind goes blank trying to recall the name of his sister-in-law. When a friend mentions Leonardo da Vinci to Yang, one of the brightest of a generation of brilliant Chinese students who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s asks, ``Who?''

Yang has a vague sense that the antidepressants are dulling his mind, that they might rob him of the mental edge he needs to create a human embryo through cloning. He doesn't have time to waste, and stops taking the drugs.

Without the drugs, however, he begins to alienate the very people who can help him most.

Yang had assumed the publicity about his cloning initiative would win the backing of UConn officials, who spent millions to build and staff the Center for Regenerative Biology at Storrs.

Deckers, a cardiologist by training, also believes Yang is moving far faster than existing science warrants.

A Catholic active in his local church, Deckers nonetheless promises he will not let his personal feelings about Yang's work stand in the way of university policy, and Yang has no evidence that Deckers is putting up roadblocks to his plans. But he is deeply upset by the dean's comments.

``Those are personal views, not university views,'' Yang repeats to friends and colleagues.

Deckers is not the only UConn administrator struggling with a difficult issue. Top officials quietly ask each other if they should place their nascent stem cell program in the hands of a dying man.

UConn President Phil Austin had asked Yang to become director of the university's planned stem cell institute. But, citing his health problems, Yang asks the university to reach outside of Connecticut and bring in a nationally known stem cell expert to head the new program so Yang can concentrate exclusively on his cloning research.

Instead, the university turns inward, to Dr. Marc Lalande, a geneticist at the UConn Health Center in Farmington, to become chairman of the university's stem cell planning group and therefore, the de facto head of the stem cell program.

Yang is furious. He confides to friends he fears the health center in Farmington -- which is led by Deckers -- will push its own agenda for stem cell research and leave the Center for Regenerative Biology in Storrs and his cloning initiative out in the cold.

His mood does not get any better when he learns that the university is looking at a building in Farmington to house its new stem cell research center.

UConn officials, like their peers at other universities, believe they must build entirely new laboratory facilities because of President Bush's funding prohibition on embryonic stem cell research. Not a chair or microscope or an hour of a post-doc's time can be paid for with federal funds. Although UConn officials feel they got a good deal acquiring the FarmTech building near the health center, Yang is petulant. He insists a stem cell lab be located in Storrs, where he can closely monitor his human embryo cloning work.

Lalande is first baffled by Yang's behavior, then angered.

He and Yang have always been on good terms and the two even chatted about potential scientific collaborations. Now, Yang bombards him with acrimonious e-mails and cellphone calls, and occasionally shouts at him during university stem cell committee meetings.

A SENSE OF BETRAYAL

Yang's feeling of betrayal intensifies when he learns that two members of the stem cell committee have come up with their own plan to divvy up the state's new stem cell money Yang is counting on.

The two researchers want the money to go to many young UConn scientists, rather than permit Yang and a few other senior researchers to apply for large grants. The plan would freeze out Yang's ambitious cloning initiative.

The state committee charged with doling out the grants decides that universities can't limit grant applications from individual scientists, a ruling that frees Yang to ask for millions of dollars to back his research.

Publicly he insists the feud is over. ``I'm an American, but I am a Chinese American,'' Yang says. ``I will do what my leaders say.''

But Yang is still fuming. University officials have failed to support me, he says to friends. Quietly, he begins to explore jobs at other universities. His cancer, however, limits his options. He is reluctant to move too far from his oncologists in New York and Boston.

Then, in the spring of 2006, things slowly begin to turn Yang's way.

He enrolls in an experimental chemotherapy trial at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the doctors tell him the growth of tumors in his lungs has slowed, perhaps even stopped.

The good news comes with a warning. His doctors caution that while the tumor growth has stalled, the tumors are still there. And cancer is notorious for its genetic instability.

Still, Yang feels like he has been given a reprieve. He tells his friends he hopes to live another 20 years.

Yang also heeds the advice of his doctors and begins taking antidepressants again. He apologizes to Lalande and other UConn officials with whom he had fought during the past few months.

``I do not want to fight with anyone,'' Yang tells them. ``I love what I do. But I don't want to fight with anyone.''

As 2006 progresses, Yang is increasingly optimistic about his chances at getting stem cell money from the state of Connecticut. He wins an appointment to the state committee that will disperse the funds. Although he cannot vote on any of the funding applications, the appointment to represent the state's scientific community illustrates his prestige within Connecticut.

He is also heartened when UConn, at his urging, hires an expert in maintaining human embryonic stem cell lines, a skill Yang will need if he is to succeed in obtaining and nurturing cells from a cloned human embryo.

His spirits also get a lift from an unlikely source: a woman who sings in the choir of a Baptist Church in East Lansing, Mich. Yang attends the church with the family of his youngest brother, Eric, the one he tended when they were frail, hungry children in rural China.

During the service, the pastor tells the congregation of Yang's visit, and of his cancer. Yang fidgets as the pastor describes the nature of his work, unsure how worshippers will view such controversial research. After the service, the woman approaches the 5-foot-5 Yang, who promptly disappears into her flowing silk choir robes.